Larry Fritsch

We’re dedicating the 2009 Standard Catalog to Larry Fritsch, and I wanted to make a note of it here.

The hobby lost one of its Mount Rushmore figures last December, a guy who also dropped a lot of knowledge on our book and assisted founding editor Bob Lemke whenever he could. It’s safe to say that Larry Fritsch helped shape our reference into what it is today.

Reading his obituary in the Stevens Point Journal, it’s clear that Fritsch was a lot more than one of the country’s top card dealers and an obsessive collector-cataloguer to boot; he was a contributing member of his community, too.

The hobby marches forward, and a lot of things have changed and promise to continue to evolve as baseball moves through a controversial era loaded with allegations about using and lying about performance-enhancing drugs. That can’t be encouraging a lot of new collectors to the hobby at the moment. A brutal economy (that doesn’t look to be improving) is forcing card companies–and the dealer ecosystem that supports them–to make tough choices. Larry Fritsch claimed to be the first full-time vintage card dealer; the ones who carry on the tradition are struggling.

One thing that will never change, however. We need more guys (and gals) like Larry Fritsch.

Update: Bob has taken it upon himself to write the dedication, which I endorse completely. I did not know how heavily Fritsch was involved in “the making of” our book until I read his dedication. Here’s an excerpt:

…each year as the “big book’s” deadline approached, Larry would make the short drive from his headquarters to ours carrying a much-annotated and dog-eared copy of the Standard Catalog into which he had penciled a year’s worth of checklist additions, corrections, set discoveries and other enhancements that he wanted to share with the hobby through these pages.

Great stuff.